As we discuss earlier in this chapter, Twitter is a terrific medium for conversation, and it's what people on the system expect. In fact, if you refrained from one-way PR blasts and instead participated in lots of exchanges, you'd be using Twitter in a way that you can't do with any other communication channels.

What does conversation look like? A lot of @messages, as described in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3. This Hoovers account is a good example: three of the four messages you can see are @replies, and the top message uses the @ convention to refer to the author of the article listed. Increasingly, corporate and organizational accounts look like this.

(Remember: @replies are usually seen only by people following both parties to the conversation. So if you want your reply to be seen by all your followers, don't put the @ at the very beginning of the tweet. For more on this important issue, see Chapter 4.)